Here’s a few tips that might help your music score sit a little hotter in a film mix.

One of the hardest tasks for an engineer to accomplish is to take loads and loads of tracks all competing for their own sonic and image space and create a mix where you are able to hear and feel everything in all it’s detailed glory.

This arduous task is even more evident in a film mix where you not only have music tracks, but sfx, ambiences, dialogue, and foley tracks as well. Now we all know, or should know, that no matter how much we love the score and the cool sfx we’ve created, or how many hours we’ve spent slaving over foley that THE most important audio component in a film mix is the dialogue.

If the audience misses a few lines, for whatever reason, the audience loses the story and we in turn lose the audience. That being said, I still love to crank the music up a bit if I can get away with it, as long as it is not competing with the dialogue and doing what the score is intended to do and that’s pushing and pulling the emotion through a scene. Since dialogue is relegated to the center channel, excepting an occasional off-screen or walk off pan, the most logical thing we can do to ease the competition with the dialogue is open up the center or “widen” our mix. The less sonic energy we have in the center, or “phantom center” if we are delivery stereo cues, the easier it will be to bring the score up in the mix and still not compete with the dialogue.

Now that doesn’t mean pan everything hard left and right, it just means use your ears and mix a little wider than you would if it was a straight music mix and keep some openness in the center for that dialogue to speak. This holds true for orchestral scores as well as rock tracks or synth textures or any type of musical score. Do, however, be very leery of using “phase tracks” to wider the image or certain reverbs and efx that utilize out of phase information to create their greater depth of field. A Dolby LtRt reduction mix, Standard Dolby Surround / Dolby Pro-Logic / Dolby Pro-Logic II, uses out of phase information in it’s surround encode process to create the Stereo LtRt that will later be decoded by your receiver.

You can actually unknowingly create a stereo music mix with information that will play out the surround channel when it is decoded. (which may be a desired or not so desired result) How do you circumvent this? Before you ever deliver a stereo music mix that is going to be used in a surround film mix make sure you have listened to your mix though a pro-logic decoder. Don’t have surround in your studio? Then make a cd and play it in your living room through your home theatre rig and turn on the Dolby Pro-Logic or Dolby Pro-Logic II decoder on your receiver and give your mix a listen. Don’t have surround in your living room or home theatre? Hey! Wake Up! It’s 2008! ;-)

Happy Mixing